ECTLogger
A real-time net logger for amateur radio, built for emergency communications teams, SKYWARN spotter nets, and the clubs that run a weekly check-in. Net Control works the list, everyone else watches it fill in live, and the log is finished the moment the net is.
Hosted, free, and open to anyone with a callsign: app.ectlogger.us
Documentation: ectlogger.us
What it does
- Live check-in logging over WebSockets, with every connected browser updating as it happens
- Several frequencies, modes, and talkgroups on one net, worked by several net controls at once
- Stations with no account and no internet still get logged, mapped, and counted
- Locations in town-and-state, GPS, Maidenhead, UTM, or MGRS, all on one map
- Station-to-station coverage: who can hear whom, logged during the net, drawn as two-way and one-way paths on the map, and built up into each operator's own map of everyone they've heard from home
- Coverage drills by site: for an exercise such as the ARES SET, each shelter and office is checked against the primary offices (two-way, through a relay, or no path), with repeater and node results, counties reached, and stations reached outside the net, all in the report and closing email; an emergency management agency's shelter or distribution point list can be imported from Excel or CSV, and is shown only to net staff apart from the sites the net supports
- Drill plans: an exercise's objectives, schedule of events, and prepared ICS-213s on the net, with a printed packet for each site, sent and received tracking through the traffic log, and objective results for the hot wash
- Recurring schedules that create their own nets, remind their staff, and rotate Net Control, even among operators who have no account yet
- A month calendar of every net: what was held, what's coming, and who is on NCS
- Formal traffic: ARRL radiograms, ICS-213, and RRI weather strips, with a full chain of custody
- Complete logs, ICS-309 Communications Logs, and multi-page PDF reports, generated on close
- Statistics and leaderboards per operator and per schedule
- Scheduled, encrypted backups with off-site copies, and a one-command restore onto a new server
The full feature list, and what each of those actually means in practice, is on the documentation site.
Documentation
Everything for operators, net control, net managers, administrators, and self-hosters lives at ectlogger.us.
| |
|---|
| Check into your first net | Five minutes, assumes nothing |
| Run your first net | Create it, log it, close it |
| Self-hosting | Install, deploy, email, logging, hardening |
| Reference | Statuses, permissions, fields, formats |
| Changelog · Roadmap · Privacy | |
Running it yourself
ECTLogger is a Python 3.11+ FastAPI backend and a React + TypeScript + Vite frontend, with SQLite by default and PostgreSQL or MySQL supported. It runs comfortably on a small Linux server.
git clone https://github.com/bradbrownjr/ectlogger.git
cd ectlogger
cp .env.example backend/.env # set SECRET_KEY and your SMTP settings
./start.sh # or .\start.ps1 on Windows
Frontend on :3000, backend on :8000, API docs at :8000/docs.
That is enough to look at it. For anything other people depend on, read production deployment first, and budget real time for email deliverability — the normal way to log in is a magic link in an email, so mail that lands in a junk folder is a login outage.
Contributing
Issues and pull requests are welcome at github.com/bradbrownjr/ectlogger.
Before writing code, read docs/DEVELOPMENT.md for the architecture and the patterns this codebase already uses, and docs/DESIGN.md for the UI rules, which are stricter than they look and exist because inconsistent controls are genuinely dangerous during an activation.
A change that alters user-facing behavior is not finished until the pages for its audience paths are updated. Which paths a change touches is decided when the roadmap item is written, not afterward.
License
MIT. See LICENSE.
Built for the amateur radio and emergency communications community, and for the net control operators, loggers, and participants who keep these nets on the air.
73 and stay safe.
